Saturday 24 February 2018

Black History Month: Black Bolsheviks

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Paul Robeson Going Home

You’re listening to Back in the USSR on CFRU 93.3 FM.  I am Siegfried.  And this is Black History Month, the final episode of a series of shows I’ve been doing on the struggle of African-Americans for liberation and self-determination.  A struggle Paul Robeson, the famous African-American actor, singer, activist and communist was very much a part of when he spoke before the racist anti-communist bigots populating the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s, at a time when Jim Crow was still very much reigning in the United States.  And as we continue to move forward in a 21st Century North America where systemic racism, police brutality, far-right fascist violence, capitalist plunder, and imperialist war remain on the march, I firmly believe that those African-Americans who gave their lives for the liberation of the working class, colonized, and oppressed peoples of the world have the right to be remembered.  Paul Robeson is one such man, W.E.B Du Bois is another, Langston Hughes, all of them saw the liberation of their people as being inextricably bound up with the liberation of oppressed peoples the world over, just as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers ultimately did and just as Black Lives Matter is rediscovering today – when they came to the conclusion that having a black figurehead in the White House would not protect ordinary black people from being murdered in the streets by cops.  After six years of broken promises, they were cruelly reminded of the bitter truth that they as a people had not been “integrated” into somekind of “post-racial” situation as Obama and the liberal media had promised, but in fact remained colonized by an American society that was and is every bit as brutal and racist as the American society that murdered Fred Hampton and the other leaders of the Black Power movement in the 1960s.  The uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, in particular revealed that black people, especially working class black people, were effectively in the same boat as the Palestinians.  And then Donald Trump came along and sealed the deal, tore the mask off as it were, exposing America once more as the monster that it was all along.

Tonight, on my final show of Black History Month, I’m going to talk about two lesser known African-Americans who you won’t hear about in school.  In the current witch-hunt atmosphere in America today, both of these men would most likely be demonized as traitors and foreign agents, just as Paul Robeson was in his own time.  But Harry Haywood and Oliver Law would no doubt smile at this slander and laugh, for both of them knew what they were fighting for.  They were communists.  Black Bolsheviks.  Internationalists.  And they were fighting for the liberation of their people just as they were fighting for the liberation of all the wretched of the earth.  They understood how it was all connected.

Harry Haywood was a long time member and leader of the Communist Party-USA and other communist organizations from the 1920’s until his death in 1985. He was the key figure in developing and popularizing the concept that Blacks represented a separate “nation” inside the United States.

While Haywood gets almost no mention in many accounts of Black history, his theoretical innovations probably did more than any other one individual to frame the terms of the debate about the historical character of the “Black community”.

The “Black Belt thesis” established the oppression of African Americans as a “national question” of utmost importance for revolutionaries in the United States.

What became known as the “Black Belt” thesis has its roots in the conception of Black Americans initially conceived by Haywood and other communists of various nationalities in the Communist International.

Basing itself on the conceptions developed by Lenin and grounded in the Soviet experience with oppressed nations, this theory held Blacks in America made up not simply a racial or ethnic group, but comprised an oppressed nation. The thesis was adopted at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International—under Stalin’s leadership—in 1928.

This conception did not mean nation in the sense of the “nation-state” as today’s common usage would suggest, but rather had its roots in the concept of how nation states were formed by capitalism. As feudalism gave way to capitalism, the new social system smashed the barriers of innumerable fiefdoms, and through a long process of war and market growth took people of different historical backgrounds and across relatively large areas and molded them into one people with a common language, national market, culture, etc. Each nation-state that developed in this way— the most common examples of this process being Western European countries, such as France and England—had a unique historical development.

Lenin’s traditional conception had held that “multi-national states” appeared in countries where the process of capitalist development had been uneven, where non-capitalist or semi-capitalist economic forms played major roles economically and socially. This held true for tsarist Russian empire, where the Romanov monarchs sought to introduce advanced capitalism, without making any changes to the country’s feudal character. Russia thus created a fusion of the most advanced capitalist methods, alongside the social structure and agricultural life of the 13th century. This historical unevenness created a multinational nation-state, spanning an entire continent, involving over 100 different distinct nationalities and ethnicities.

Haywood saw a similarity in the situation of African Americans. Although brought to America from many different ethnicities and cultures, the unique experience of slavery overtime forged Africans into a new distinct people. For Haywood, this was not only a cultural phenomenon—in which Blacks developed a common identity based on their common experiences and struggles—but also had a geographic basis. The transformation of Africans of disparate backgrounds into a common African American nation occurred over a defined land base in the Deep South where Blacks maintained a majority of the populace.

After the overthrow of Reconstruction, debt peonage in the south and the Jim Crow system further ingrained the super-exploitation of Blacks in the “Black Belt” south as a dominant and enduring feature of U.S. capitalism. The region in question, Haywood argued, in fact represented an internal colony. What followed from this was the notion that if Blacks made up a “nation” within the United States, they also had the right to self-determination.

Harry Haywood did not develop his theoretical conceptions on the Black nation out of any desire for Black separatism; he was totally committed to the idea of a united working class party. However he realized only a party that bases itself on a life and death struggle against white supremacy could overcome the obstacles to class unity. Such a struggle was necessary to earn the trust of the Black masses on one hand, and to break white workers away from ruling class ideology on the other.

While Black communists collaborated with all sorts of other forces in the mass struggle, Haywood made a clear distinction about the program of communists. The communists’ efforts to win working-class leadership of the Black liberation struggle and their advocacy for socialism as the only resolution to national oppression, brought them into conflict with bourgeois Black leaders of both the “integrationist” and “nationalist” type.

Haywood subjected both the bourgeois integrationist trend and the nationalist trend in the 1930s Black community to a class analysis. The integrationist NAACP and Urban League, represented by “successful businessmen, top-echelon leaders, upper-bracket educators, and local politicians,” typically commanded leadership of the Black movement, due to their deep linkages to Wall Street and white philanthropic organizations.

On the other hand, the nationalists were rooted in the Black “ghettos” among “small businessmen, the intelligentsia, professionals and the like” and expressed the desires of the Black petit-bourgeoisie, stunted by modern imperialism, to control the economic life of Black urban communities. In conditions of crisis especially, Haywood noted, the nationalists’ appeal to race solidarity or Back-to-Africa programs had the capability of attracting large sections of the Black poor, for whom the integrationists provided no economic answers.

Haywood asserted it was necessary for communists to recognize the anti-imperialist, revolutionary potential and historical legitimacy of the Black nationalist movement. At the same time, Haywood warned the Party that the militancy of its petty bourgeois stratum “is very misleading” (424) and repeatedly pushed the Party to not make the opposite mistake of “surrendering to the propaganda of local nationalists.”

Haywood’s point is further reinforced by the fact that “Black capitalist” schemes have on several occasions found support amongst the most reactionary elements of the white community, from the Ku Klux Klan to Richard Nixon, who proclaimed in 1968 that many Black militants merely wanted a “piece of the action” rather than an overturning of the social system.

One good example of Haywood’s departure from petty bourgeois Black nationalism is in the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the 1930’s, which took root in Harlem, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. These campaigns, led by local Black nationalists who shunned work with whites, took aim at the white-owned stores that excluded Blacks from employment while selling products in the ghetto. Nationalist leaders called for the white employees to be replaced with Black employees at the targeted stores, a demand that quickly developed a significant following.

Haywood knew that the campaigns thrived on the “justly felt anger” of the Black working-class, but argued that “the ruling class was overjoyed with this type of movement” because it blurred the class line and “tended to quickly become anti-white.” They “directed the struggle against these small establishments, which had only a small fraction of jobs,” as well as white workers, and thus “the broad struggle of Black unemployed was diverted away from the large corporations located mostly outside the ghetto.”

Haywood argued that the Communist Party could not stand aloof from this struggle for Black jobs, instead calling for the Party to focus on a broader campaign, spearheaded by Black and white unionists, which did not call for the firing of any existing workers.

Haywood’s tactics always started with the Party’s strategic outlook: building Black-white unity in the fight against both national and class oppression. Indeed, Haywood devoted a good deal of his political energies, as well as his later autobiography, to this fundamental question facing revolutionaries in the United States.

Building class unity has never been an easy task. For one, white supremacy has long functioned as an unofficial state religion. Secondly, Black people in the United States face “special oppression” above and beyond the “normal” forms of oppression meted out by capitalist society; the resistance to these forms of oppression will thus take a unique form.

Finally, looking over the country’s history, a pattern emerges in which Black people surge forward in struggle, become the engine for radicalism in society as a whole, but are crushed by the combined forces of the ruling class before a sizable enough section of white workers recognize their common interests with the Black freedom movement.

Liberals and nationalists tend to accept this pattern as inevitable and irreversible, but draw opposite conclusions: either that Black people should go slow and not demand so much (the liberal argument), or that Black people should focus on carving out spaces or states independent of the existing social order (the nationalist argument). Revolutionary Marxists support the right of self-determination, but also propose a different solution to the uneven development of political consciousness among different sectors: a fighting organization that has fused together the workers leading in each sector, maintains significant influence in each, and frames tactics that promote the common benefits of class struggle and Black liberation.

This perspective of promoting multinational unity is easy to uphold on paper, but must be fought for in practice. Stirring up racism among white workers has long been the most powerful weapon in the ruling class’s arsenal. Further, Haywood recognized that the nationalist sentiments of the Black working class inevitably would find some expression within the Party—a phenomenon that he warned against most emphatically in the Party’s 1934 Convention.

Haywood wrote:
    “Just as the ruling class ideology of white supremacy had its influences on white comrades, it was not unusual that Black comrades would similarly be affected by petty bourgeois nationalist ideology. These moods were and sentiments were expressed in feelings of distrust of white comrades, in skepticism about the possibility of winning white workers to active support in the struggle for Black rights, and in the attitude that nothing could be accomplished until white chauvinism was completely eliminated. This latter was particularly dangerous because it failed to understand that white chauvinism could only be broken down in the process of struggle.”

Haywood recognized that multi-national unity is not a feel-good exercise, or simply a helpful secondary factor. Rather, a united working class is the only road to an overthrow of capitalism, which holds the only chance for the full liberation of the mass of Black workers, who constitute the vast majority of Blacks in America.

This is the legacy left to us by Harry Haywood: a critical and uncompromising dedication to the total liberation of Black workers, the working class, and humanity itself.

The Coup - Dig It
 


Oliver Law was a communist, labor organizer and the first Black person in the United States to lead an integrated military force in the country’s history.  Unlike Harry Haywood, he was not a theorist, but, like him, he was a fighter.

Having joined the U.S. Army prior, in 1919, it wouldn’t be till he long left it, that he would join the Communist Party in 1932.

His work with them, as well as his political activities through the International Labor Defense, kept cops constantly on his coattails. In once incident, the Chicago Police Red Squad severely assaulted him.

In another incident, Law was arrested while speaking at a demonstration in Chicago on August 31, 1935, against Italy's occupation of Ethiopia during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. He was involved with organizing mass protests against the occupation.

A year later, Law joined the joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the thousands of international volunteers that traveled to Spain to fight against Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco and the rise of the fascist Nationalists.

Fighting alongside the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, which occurred between July 1936 and April 1939, Law was named commander of the entire Brigade for several days and commander of its Machine Gun regiment for much longer.

The Black communist fighter led the Brigade during the initial days of the Brunete offensive. But on the fourth day of the campaign, he was fatally wounded while leading his command in an assault on Mosquito Ridge.

Five decades after his death, Law's historic achievement was recognized when Chicago Mayor Harold Washington declared November 21, 1987 as "Oliver Law and Abraham Lincoln Brigade Day.”

John McCutcheon - The Abraham Lincoln Brigade

Sunday 11 February 2018

Black History Month: Slavery, MLK and American Capitalism

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Martin Luther King – “Why I am opposed to the war in Vietnam

Jurassic 5 – “Freedom

You’re listening to Back in the USSR here on CFRU 93.3 FM, I am Siegfried, this is Black History Month and that was Dr Martin Luther King Jr himself, an excerpt from his anti-imperialist speech condemning the war in Vietnam and expressing his staunch opposition to empire and the capitalist system driving it.  To begin this second show of Black History Month, I’d like to compare Martin’s words in his speech on Vietnam with the words of another African-American leader one century before him.  This is what Frederick Douglass said in 1852 in “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro". 

Frederick Douglass was speaking at a time when slavery was still a major mode of production within the context of American capitalism.  As historian Edward E. Baptist made clear in his book “The Half Has Never Been Told”, slavery played an integral role in capital accumulation in early America, with black slave labor producing massive profits for plantation owners, banks, and commercial interests alike.  Making millions of Africans work for free from sunup to sundown was a very profitable thing, that’s why so many black people were kidnapped from Africa in the first place and brought half-way around the world to grow cotton, sugar and other cash crops under the merciless law of the whip and the gun.  Consider this: In the span of a single lifetime after the 1780s, the American South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out plantations to a sub-continental empire. Entrepreneurial enslavers moved more than 1 million enslaved people, by force, from the communities that survivors of the slave trade from Africa had built in the South and in the West to vast territories that were seized—also by force—from their Native American inhabitants.

1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. Their practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity at the time, as it was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation—not only increasing its power and size, but also, eventually, dividing US politics, differentiating regional identities and interests, and helping to make civil war possible.  That’s the context in which Frederick Douglass and the other heroes of the abolitionist cause were writing.

And I want to be clear, lest some people think Canada had no part in this history of profitable enslavement.  The history of slavery in Canada spanned two centuries in what was New France and Lower Canada under British rule. Canada was involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Within the country’s borders, people were bought, sold and enslaved. Canada was further linked to the institution of enslavement through international trade. The country exchanged products such as salted cod and timber for slave-produced goods such as rum, molasses, tobacco and sugar from slaveholding colonies in the Caribbean.  Black people were kept captive by people of all classes — from governors to priests, to blacksmiths, to tailors; and from figures such as Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, to James McGill, the founder of McGill University, one of Canada’s top universities. While slave ownership filled a need for cheap labour, it was also considered part of an individual’s personal wealth. The law enforced and maintained enslavement through legal contracts that detailed transactions of the buying, selling or hiring out of enslaved persons, as well as the terms of wills in which enslaved people were passed on to others. As chattel, they had no basic rights or freedoms and they were either treated humanely or cruelly, depending on their slave master.

French and English colonies depended on slave labour for economic growth. The intention of enslaving Black people was to exploit their labour. Colonists wanted free labour to increase their personal wealth, and in turn, enhance local and colonial economies. In Canada, the majority of enslaved people worked as domestic servants in households, cooking and cleaning, and taking care of their owners’ children. Many were employed in the businesses of their owners, including for example inns, taverns, mills and butcher shops. Enslaved Black people cleared land, chopped wood, built log homes and made furniture in the colonies. As agricultural workers, they prepared fields, planted and harvested crops and tended to livestock. Many also worked as hunters, voyageurs, sailors, miners, laundresses, printing press operators, fishermen, dock workers, seamstresses, hair dressers and even as executioners. Slave labour was used to make a range of products, such as potash, soap, bricks, candles, sails and ropes. Enslaved males were trained and employed in skilled trades such as blacksmiths, carpenters, cobblers, wainwrights and coopers. They were often “hired out” as a way for slave owners to earn more money on their investment. Enslaved Black people laboured long hours, doing physically strenuous tasks, and were always at the beck and call of their masters.

Introduced by French colonial settlers in New France in the early 1600s, slavery lasted until it was abolished throughout British North America in 1834.  While it might not have been as integral to the economy as slavery in the southern plantation country was, slavery was a major driver of economic growth from the time fish caught on the East Coast became a staple of the diet of slaves in the British colonies in the West Indies in the 1600s. The British government in 1790 passed the Imperial Statute of 1790, which allowed colonial settlers in the U.S. loyal to the British, to bring in “negros (sic), household furniture, utensils of husbandry, or cloathing (sic)” into Canada duty-free.   Around 3,000 enslaved men, women and children of African descent were brought into British North America. By the 1790s, the number of enslaved Black people in the Maritimes (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island) ranged from 1,200 to 2,000. There were about 300 in Lower Canada (Québec), and between 500 and 700 in Upper Canada (Ontario).

In early Canada, some slave owners held a small number of slaves, while others had more than 20. Father Louis Payet, the priest of Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu, Québec, owned five slaves — one Indigenous and four Black. James McGill, member of the Assembly of Lower Canada and founder of McGill University, counted six enslaved Black persons as part of his property holdings. Boatswain and Jane were both owned by Loyalist widow Catherine Clement in Niagara, where they were advertised for sale in the Niagara Herald in 1802. Noted deputy superintendent of the Indian Department, Matthew Elliott, is known to have held at least 60 enslaved Black people on his large estate in Fort Malden, Ontario (present-day Amherstburg). British army officer Sir John Johnson brought 14 Black slaves with him to early Canada. Prominent military officer and merchant John Askin bought and sold as many as 23 slaves on both sides of the Detroit River. James Girty traded with, and was an interpreter for, the Indigenous peoples in the Ohio region. He owned at least three enslaved Black people in Gosfield Township in Essex County, Ontario. One of his slaves — Jack York — was accused of an offense against a White woman and was sentenced to be hanged. However, Jack escaped before the sentence could be carried out.

Slave ownership was prevalent among the members of the early Upper Canada Legislative Assemblies, as well. Six out of the 16 members of the first Parliament of the Upper Canada Legislative Assembly (1792–96) were slave owners or had family members who owned slaves: John McDonell, Ephraim Jones, Hazelton Spencer, David William Smith, and François Baby all owned slaves, and Philip Dorland’s brother Thomas owned 20 slaves. Dorland was replaced in Parliament by slave owner Peter Van Alstine. And the following six out of the nine original members of the upper house of the Legislative Council of Upper Canada were also slave owners and/or members of slaveholding families: Peter Russell, James Baby, Alexander Grant Sr., Richard Duncan, Richard Cartwright and Robert Hamilton. Peter Russell, the first receiver and auditor general of Upper Canada, had a free Black man named Pompadour working for him. But Pompadour’s wife Peggy and their three children Jupiter, Amy and Milly were enslaved by Russell.

The following 14 out of the 17 members of the second Parliament of the Upper Canada Legislative Assembly (1797–1800) either enslaved Black people or were from slaveholding families. David W. Smith, who was serving his second term in the Assembly, was a slaveholder. Thomas Fraser, who owned four slaves in the District of Johnstown, was the district’s first sheriff and came from a Loyalist slaveholding family. Richard Beasley owned several slaves in Hamilton, and Richard Norton Wilkinson was in possession of a Black woman and two Black children. Thomas McKee came from a slave-owning family and enslaved eight Black people himself. Dr. Solomon Jones purchased an eight-year-old Black girl from his brother Daniel in 1788, and Timothy Thompson owned a number of enslaved Black people in the Midland District (see Midland). Robert Isaac Dey Gray was Upper Canada’s first solicitor general, and became a slave owner when his father, Major James Gray, died, leaving him a Black woman named Dorinda Baker and her sons Simon and John. Benjamin Hardison owned Chloe Cooley before selling her to Adam Vrooman. Samuel Street and his business partner Thomas Butler (son of Colonel John Butler of Butler’s Rangers) dealt in the sale of many goods, including enslaved people. In 1786, they sold “a Negro wench named Sarah about nine Years old” to Adam Crysler for £40. William Fairfield and Edward Jessup Jr. were also from families that enslaved Black people. And lastly, Christopher Robinson was from a family that enslaved Black people and was also the sponsor of the 1798 Bill to authorize and allow persons coming into this Province to settle to bring with them their Negro Slaves. Though the bill passed the first three readings in the Assembly, the Legislative Council tied up the bill until the close of the parliamentary session, and in doing so prevented it from becoming law. The introduction of this bill reflected an opposition to the abolition of slavery in the province.

Members of Nova Scotia’s Legislative Assembly were also slave owners. James DeLancey and Major Thomas Barclay, both of whom served in the 6th General Assembly (1785–93), owned six and seven slaves respectively. James Moody, who sat in the 7th General Assembly (1793–99) possessed eight slaves. John Taylor, who was a sitting member in the 8th General Assembly (1799–1806), held six Black people in bondage.

Just as in America, while the formal system of enslavement in Canada ceased to exist in the 19th Century, specifically in 1834 when slavery was officially abolished throughout the British Empire, 184 years later, Black people remain policed, monitored and marginalized by state institutions.  While they make up only 3 percent of the population, they represent 10 percent of the people incarcerated in Canada.  So slavery existed in Canada, and racism against black people in this country is still a very real thing, not that it’s much talked about.  There’s a real tendency in this country to downplay things like racism and racist violence and say that they “don’t happen here” or they’re somehow an “American problem” and that’s just not true.  There’s a lot of ignorance about the real history of Canada and that needs to change.

The Welfare Poets “Let it be known

You’re listening to Back in the USSR.  Now, I started the program talking about Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader, anti-war activist, and prime target of the American national security state for his efforts with regard to both of these things.  This might be hard to believe to some people today, given how everyone seems to invoke his name and speak words of praise, not only in politics but in the business world as well.  I remember hearing one marketing guru using his name in the same sentence as Apple Computers once.  And if you look at the real history of his life and career, it becomes clear just how much of an effort there’s been to reduce him from the radical figure that he was into a harmless icon who can be used to sell products in Superbowl commercials.  That’s exactly when the next piece I’m going to play is all about.  This is an interview with African-American historian Gerald Horne this past week on the Real News Network.


Public Enemy “By the Time I Get to Arizona

You’re listening to Back in the USSR.  Gerald Horne briefly mentioned the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and expressed his doubts as to the official narrative about his killing, something which many others have also had over the years.  I want to focus on that right now in fact, because, as you’ll see, there is considerable documentary evidence that the United States government did in fact conspire to murder King because they indeed viewed him as a threat: for his anti-war stance on Vietnam, to his growing criticism of the capitalist system in America, to his mobilization of working class people and his plans on initiating a tent city occupy-style protest in Washington D.C. around the issue of poverty, to the increasingly radical message he was delivering to oppressed African-Americans.  This next clip is of Barry Zwicker discussing the details of King’s assassination in light of the evidence now available.

Martin Luther King Assassination, New Evidence (Barrie Zwicker, 360 Degree Vision, 2008)

William Pepper, “The Execution of Martin Luther King,” (Seattle, WA, 2008)

Tuesday 6 February 2018

Black History Month: Political Prisoners USA

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Paul Robeson - Ol’ Man River


You’re listening to Back in the USSR, here on CFRU 93.3 FM, I am Siegfried, and that was the great Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River” from the 1933 musical “Showboat”.  Paul Robeson, the Afro-American singer, actor, civil rights leader, internationalist, communist, and tireless fighter for the rights and self-determination of his people as well as those of colonized and oppressed peoples around the world.  He was and is a great man, along with many other great Afro-Americans like WEB Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Harry Haywood, and so many others who were not afraid to stand up against a racist capitalist system in their own country and all over the world.  This is Black History Month and, as I’ve done before, I plan on focusing a series of shows on the particular subject of the ongoing struggle of black people for liberation.  Because it is ongoing.  Racism still exists and remains virulent in this age of Trump and rising fascism, hate and escalating violence.  Afro-Americans continue to be killed by the police.  Working class black people in particular continue to live in poverty and continue to face systemic discrimination in schools, in housing, and on the job market.  America’s prisons remain disproportionately packed with black people and African-American political prisoners remain behind bars.  It’s this issue of political prisoners that I want to begin with tonight, because America has them and has them in considerable numbers in spite of the American government’s wholesale denial of this fact.  And I want to read a passage from Michael Parenti’s text “Democracy for the Few” outlining the scope of just how much the American state has targeted people, particularly African-Americans, for political reasons:

Numerous African-American leaders involved in progressive community causes and struggles against drug pushers have been railroaded into prison on trumped-up charges.  Thus, after police planted heroin in his bookstore, Martin Sostre, an outspoken opponent of the heroin traffic, was sentenced to thirty years for drug dealing, on the word of a convict who later admitted that his testimony had been fabricated.  Sostre served nine years, mostly in solitary confinement.  After much pressure from progressive groups, New York governor Mario Cuomo granted him amnesty.

Frank Shuford, an African-American activist and anticapitalist in Santa Ana, California, developed a number of community programs and helped people organize against drug dealers and their corrupt police allies.  He was arrested for the shooting of two store clerks.  Neither clerk identified him as the gunman and no material evidence was presented against him.  At his trial, Shuford was branded a "revolutionary troublemaker" by the prosecution.  His own lawyer conducted a strangely lackadaisical defense, then was himself appointed a district attorney immediately after Shuford was found guilty by an all-White jury and sentenced to thirty years.  In prison, Shuford was drugged, beaten, denied medical care, and scheduled for a lobotomy.  Only community pressure on his behalf prevented the operation from taking place.  Shuford served over ten years.

The leaders of Black Men's Movement Against Crack, an organization dedicated to fighting the narcotics trade in New York, were imprisoned on trumped up charges of "illegal possession of weapons, attempted escape, and assault."

In Tchula, Mississippi, Eddie Carthan was elected the first African-American mayor since Reconstruction, and the first to buck the local plutocracy.  Carthan refused to appoint cronies of the big planters, declined bribes, and investigated the corruption of previous administrations.  He started programs for nutrition, health care, day care, and housing rehabilitation for poor people.  The Board of Aldermen, dominated by planter interests, cut his salary to virtually nothing and barred him from his city hall office.  The governor had all federal funds to Tchula cut off, ending most of the mayor's programs.  When Carthan retook his office with five auxiliary police, he was charged with assault and sentenced to three years, convicted on the testimony of a witness who later recanted.  The FBI targeted the mayor, combing through his records and papers, discovering only that Carthan had authorized an assistant to sign his name to a delivery receipt for day-care equipment; for this "fraud" he was given an additional four-year sentence.  Then, after a Black alderman was robbed and murdered and the murderer convicted, Carthan was charged with having plotted the murder.  He was eventually released only after protest campaigns were launched around the country.  The low-income Black voters of Tchula got a lesson is what happens to democratic leaders when they intrude - however modestly - upon an entrenched and wealthy class power.

Community activist and leader of African self-determination, Fred Hampton Jr. (son of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was murdered by law officers), was tried on a bogus charge of arson in Chicago.  During the trial no evidence was produced demonstrating that Hampton was connected to the fires or that they had ever actually happened.  Yet he was given eighteen years and later subjected to serious mistreatment in prison for organizing around inmates' rights.

Prisoners who propagate radical political views or who engage in protests regarding prison conditions have been singled out for mind-control programs, subjected to mind-altering drugs, beatings, forced rectal searches, prolonged shackling, isolation, and other tortures.  Inmates in U.S. prisons, noted Amnesty International in 1998, "have reportedly been put in supermax units because of their political affiliations."

From 1968 to 1971, over three hundred members of the Black Panther Party were arrested, many held without bail or trial for long durations.  At least ten former Panthers, convicted on fabricated evidence and testimony that was subsequently recanted, served thirty years each in prison.  Still in prison as of 2000 are three Panthers, Herman Bell, Anthony Bottom, and Albert Washington, whose trial included perjured testimony and evidence suppressed by the prosecution.  Panther leader Geronimo Pratt was charged with murdering a woman when he was a UCLA student.  The FBI conveniently lost its surveillance records showing that Pratt was actually four hundred miles away attending a Panther meeting in Oakland at the time of the murder.  The FBI chose to let the real murderer go free in order to jail a political radical.  Pratt finally had his conviction overturned in 1997, and was paid a settlement of $4.5 million.

There is the highly celebrated death-row case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, ex-Panther, radio journalist, and articulate critic of social injustice and police brutality, who had been under police and FBI surveillance for years even though he had no criminal record.  He was shot when trying to stop a cop from beating his brother.  The officer doing the beating was killed by one of the bullets fired.  In a deeply flawed trial, involving an incompetent defense, police perjury, and intimidated witnesses, Abu-Jamal was convicted of murder, even though no ballistic evidence linked him to the shooting, and several eyewitnesses claimed that another man shot the cop and fled the scene.

...Still behind bars are members of the Black Liberation Army, the Republic of New Afrika (a Black separatist movement), the African Peoples Socialist Party, Chicano and Native American anticapitalist revolutionaries, community radical organizers, and peace activists."
(Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 7th Edition. Thomson Wadsworth, 2002, pg 143-145)

To illustrate the plight of political prisoners further and the harsh realities they face, here’s a clip of former Black Panther leader Eddie Conway, who himself spent more than forty years in prison on trumped up charges after he was politically targeted by the American government, speaking at Red Emma’s in Baltimore this past week.


That African-Americans are disproportionately targeted by the American legal system is well known.  Black American youths in particular are more likely to be arrested, held without bail, put on trial and convicted, less likely to be able to plea-bargain their way out of tough mandatory sentences and more likely to get longer prison terms than white people who commit the same crimes.  Five times as many white people use drugs in the US compared with black people, yet almost two thirds of drug offenders sent to state prisons nationwide are African-American and in some states it’s as high as 90%.  The majority of black people in American prisons are serving time for nonviolent offenses, often drug related.

This is the reality, and furthermore there is the reality of just how brutal the American prison system is, with regard to the widespread use of violence, solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, unpaid prison labor and the like.  This is a report from the Real News Network on a prison strike going on right now in Florida, where prisoners have had enough of these insufferable conditions and are fighting back – refusing to engage in prison labor.